New passenger car registrations in the EU continued to fall in February. 719,465 vehicles mean a drop of 6.7 percent year-on-year, as the industry association Acea announced on Thursday. So few cars have never been sold in February since records began.
The reason is the disruptions in the supply chain, for example in the case of semiconductors. Compared to January, when the minus was 6 percent, the decline accelerated – and experts do not expect any improvement for the time being. “Since the end of February, the situation has gotten even worse. New bottlenecks in important supplier products are leading to production stoppages,” said Peter Fuss from the consulting firm EY. “The ability of the car manufacturers to deliver has thus further deteriorated considerably.”
The industry is working flat out to get missing components and raw materials from previous suppliers Ukraine and Russia replacing it with other sources of supply or ramping up production at other locations, but that takes time, said Fuß. “For customers, this means that the availability of new cars will continue to deteriorate. Delivery times will become even longer. Prices will probably continue to rise.” At the same time, he sees the risk of subdued demand due to rising inflation, falling real wages and record high fuel prices.
According to Acea, the four most important car markets developed differently in February. While Italy and France declines of 22.6 and 13 percent, respectively Spain and Germany by 6.6 and 3.2 percent respectively.
Manufacturers affected to varying degrees
The manufacturers were also affected differently. the VolkswagenGroup as the market leader was down 11.5 percent and had 176,000 new registrations. It was followed by the Stellantis group – to which, for example peugeot, Fiat and Opel belong – with 151,000 cars and a decrease of 19.5 percent. At Mercedes-Benz (+1.5 percent) and the bmwgroup (-1.5 percent) there was little movement.